Collaborative Learning of Ontology Fragments by Co-operating Agents

Collaborating agents require either prior agreement on the shared vocabularies that they use for communication, or some means of translating between their private ontologies. Thus, techniques that enable agents to build shared vocabularies allow them to share and learn new concepts, and are therefore beneficial when these concepts are required on multiple occasions. However, if this is not carried out in an effective manner then the performance of an agent may be adversely affected by the time required to infer over large augmented ontologies, so causing problems in time-critical scenarios such as search and rescue. In this paper, we present a new technique that enables agents to augment their ontology with carefully selected concepts into their ontology. We contextualise this generic approach in the domain of RoboCup Rescue. Specifically, we show, through empirical evaluation, that our approach saves more civilians, reduces the percentage of the city burnt, and spends the least amount of time accessing its ontology compared with other state of the art benchmark approaches.